


Loved, Owed

by quigonejinn



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-30
Updated: 2013-07-30
Packaged: 2017-12-21 19:55:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/904247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six alternate universes centered on Mako Mori.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loved, Owed

**Author's Note:**

> These have gore and character death and suicide and non-graphic references to sexual abuse of a child.

1.

Mako, there are so many universes where you don't end up as a Jaeger pilot.

Take, for example, the universe where your mother's parents decide to meet your father after his chemotherapy appointment is over. Why bring a child to the medical center to sit and wait? You stay behind in their comfortable, small apartment, being fussed over and fed treats by your beloved grandmother. You watch a cartoon about a band of enterprising cats, and then your grandfather tells you charming stories about his childhood in the country. When the kaiju sirens go off, they wake you. 

Your grandparents bundle you into your coat and shoes, take their emergency preparation kit, squabbling a little about whether to bring only one or two pillows for you to sleep on in case the kaiju attack is a long one. Holding your grandfather's hand, you are part of an orderly line down to the kaiju shelter for their apartment building. 

Therefore, you learn about the deaths of your parents in the abstract: you cry: there are tens of thousands of deaths. You weep. You go to the memorial to the dead in the heart of the city and lay flowers there, and you have nightmares for weeks about being left behind. 

On the other hand, you never walk down the street with one shoe on and the other in your hand, screaming because screaming is the only comfort left to you. You never see your mother, her bottom half pinned to the ground by a pile of fallen concrete the size of a car, blood pulsing down the left side of her face. She is telling you, desperately, over and over, shouting as loud as she can over the sirens: _run, child, run, Mama loves you, be a good girl and run away_

Is your life worse because you never know these things? 

2.

Are your grandparents living the only way out of becoming a Jaeger pilot? No, there are universes where they die, and you still do not become a Jaeger pilot. Is it still your mother begging for you to be a good girl and run away? Is it your father instead? Your whole family is dead; Stacker Pentecost is either unable to track you down at the orphanage or decides that you deserve better than an adoptive father who will probably be dead in a few years anyways. 

You are a kaiju orphan, and the ethics of international and cross-cultural adoptions notwithstanding, Japan is a wreck. Large sections of Tokyo were functionally destroyed, and you end up adopted by a family previously living in Seattle. You are lucky. They are wealthy enough to buy a home three hundred miles inland; they are Christians, and they ask Jesus to help save your soul, but they are good people. The extent of it is that they make you go to church with them until you go to college. They also make you participate in Bible Group at the church until you are sixteen.

You dye your hair blue to shock them; you fight with them a lot, but again: you are lucky. They are good people, and they pay for you to go to years of therapy. They pay for you to go to college -- you go to a very good one out East, and when you tell them two months into your freshman year that you haven't been to church since coming back to campus, that you have no intention of ever going again, there is a long, shocked moment of silence on the phone. Then, they tell you that they still love you. You tell them that you love them.

Your first year out of college, while working at a media conglomerate in New York, the Breach is closed Nobody is getting any work done that day, and Marilynne, who you have lunch with a couple times a week, comes by your work station. You have the NYTimes site pulled up, and she tells you to go back to the front page. 

"I thought all of them went down," you say.

"No, one of them came back. Hit refresh," she says, and you do.

She's right. One of the four pilots came back. 

"He's cute," you say. 

"Raleigh Becket," she says, squinting to read it off the page while standing behind you. 

3.

_run, child, run, Mama loves you, be a good girl and run away_

A word in favor of your courage, Mako Mori. How old are you? Nine? Ten? There are plenty of universes where you don't run, where you try to dig your mother out of the rubble.

There are, admittedly, also a few universes where you are too scared to either try to dig her out or run.

Either way, there are plenty of universes where you die in the street in Tokyo. 

4.

There are also plenty of universes where Stacker Pentecost saves your life in the streets of Tokyo, and in most of these universes, he comes for you in the orphanage eventually. It takes him a while, either because of international red tape on cross-racial, cross-cultural adoptions or because he has reservations about adopting a child when he has hopefully five, an outside chance at ten years to live. What kind of man would he be if he adopted you, then couldn't promise to give you a home until you were grown? 

Either way, you spend a few extra months in the orphanage. What is the result?

In some universes, the first time you Drift with Raleigh Becket, his lapse in control sends you into a spiral of remembering kaiju. You are back on the streets of Tokyo, shoe in hand, tears on your cheeks.

In other universes, kaiju are not the worst memory you have. There is no screaming, just muffled noises and pain.

Once he gets out of the Drift, Raleigh Becket walks over to Stacker Pentecost, asks to see him privately, and when Stacker tells Raleigh to come in and close the door behind him, Raleigh decks Stacker for not getting you sooner. 

"Never touch you again?" Raleigh yells, fist still cocked back, knuckles bloody with Stacker holding his lip. "How about the fact you promised her you'd come back for her? You know what he said to get her to -- "

5.

There is a universe where Stacker Pentecost saves you on the streets of Tokyo, but you never Drift with Raleigh Becket: you meet Stacker next the Helipad in the rain and give him an umbrella. You express an opinion to Stacker about Raleigh Becket not being what you expected; Raleigh Becket surprises you by responding in accented Japanese. In the elevator down to the working bays, he talks kaiju tattoos with the one of the scientists, and when Raleigh says that he and his brother took that one down, he looks over to see if you're paying attention. 

You give him an amused smile.

When the three of you get down to the working bay, Max and Herc and Chuck are there. Max gives a delighted bark and comes galloping towards you; you get down on your knees and let him drool over your arms. In this universe, though, it's Chuck who says the line about remembering pretty girls. He kisses you on the cheek, puts his arm around your waist when you stand up. You ignore the look he gives Raleigh, but you let Tendo Choi walk Raleigh Becket through the revamped Gipsy Rose. After all, you're a co-pilot on Eureka Strike, not an engineer. Childhood affection turned to something more? Wartime romance? Either way, the Kaidanovskys are not the only married couple to pilot a Jaeger. 

_There are so many things I've never said out loud_ , he says in the Japanese he learned for you. 

"I know them all," you tell him in English.

His collarbone is broken, and you are dressed for Drift. He is not; if you are successful, he will never put on a Drift suit again. Nobody will ever need to fight a kaiju again, and the thought makes you feel strangely -- well, what? You don't have words for it. On the other hand, you can guess the cost of success will probably be, so you give him back the wedding ring you had been carrying: pilots can't wear jewelry underneath their Drift suits, but you liked the old-fashioned touch and wore it, when not Drifting, over a tattoo of a black band with the Eureka Striker insignia in the middle instead of a diamond. Tacky, but what were you going to do? It made him happy; both of you had been drunk, and what else was there to do in Canberra? Back then, there were months between kaiju. 

So you fold the ring into his hand, and he closes his fingers around it. The two of you stand together for a long moment, his mouth on your forehead, your arm around his waist. There is no time for anything else, not even regret, and you pat Max one last time. You hug Herc. 

You step into the Jaeger with Stacker Pentecost. 

6.

There is a universe where you meet Stacker Pentecost in the streets of Tokyo, but he doesn't remember you. He has a vague sense of vivid blue, but thinks it might be a hallucination. After all, he has been in a for three hours with his co-pilot gasping and struggling and disconnected from the neural handshake. He has been bearing the weight of Coyote Tango alone, and when he looks again behind the dumpster, he doesn't see you anymore.

He never comes for you in the orphanage, but you make your way out by will and anger. It is, in fact, easier for you to join the Jaeger program as an orphan: without Stacker Pentecost's personal knowledge of how deep the scars go, you rise, quick and bright, in the Jaeger Academy. You don't meet Stacker Pentecost in the rain by the helipad; you meet Raleigh Becket while Max dozes at your feet and Chuck and Herc squabble. You were the best and brightest at the Academy, so where would they put you but in the fastest, newest Jaeger? Eureka Striker is the fastest Jaeger on the planet, and Chuck Hansen is good at his job. He is also attractive, and you sleep with him from time to time; from time to time, when he is drunk, he also tells you that he loves you, but you do not want that kind of complication in your life. 

Because Chuck Hansen breaks his collarbone, Stacker Pentecost steps into the Drift for the final run. His mind knits with yours, and you can feel the layers sliding together, then coming apart most of the way again -- only most. Part of his mind will always be in yours, and part of your mind will be in his: just as you learned the layout of Sydney before you'd put a foot on Australian soil, now you know about Stacker's father, his sister. Tamsin and how the last time he was a happy was a long, long time ago. 

For his part, he suddenly knows about --

"There is nothing to apologize for," you say, and your voice is as brisk as you can make it. There is no hiding either the bad or the good in the Drift. All that matters is the mission. "Are you ready?"

Stacker closes his eyes, then open them again. He nods. You respect him for that: you have always respected him, and you gave up resenting him after you were posted to Eureka Striker. After all, what did he owe you? What had he ever owed you? 

In the end, it doesn't matter what you respect or resent, Mako Mori. It doesn't even matter whether you keep your eyes open or closed. Light burns everything; you feel no grief, only a fierce, clear righteousness. The pain is blinding, but quickly over. 

In this life, in this universe, in this version of yourself, Mako Mori, what did you have a chance to love?

**Author's Note:**

> DESTRONOMICS HAD ALL THE CRAZY GOOD IDEAS IN THIS AS USUAL


End file.
